Intel Corporation today announced several advancements to its Intel® Scalable System Framework (Intel® SSF) that promise to bring high performance computing (HPC) capabilities and benefits to more industries and new workloads. As a foundational element of the Intel SSF, Intel introduced the Intel® Omni-Path Architecture (Intel® OPA), a new HPC-optimized fabric technology that makes the performance of HPC clusters more accessible to a broader variety of users.

Once reserved only for governments and academia to solve the most complex computational problems, like genome sequencing and climate research, HPC is transforming more industries with new workloads such as big data analytics. More and more, traditional sectors, like healthcare and financial services, are demanding supercomputer-like capabilities to gain real-time insights from increasingly large and complex data sets. As Intel innovations expand HPC capabilities and lower the barriers to adoption, it predicts HPC will become mainstream.

“We’re entering a new era in which supercomputing is being transformed from a tool for a specific problem to a general tool for many,” said Charlie Wuischpard, vice president and general manager of HPC Platform Group at Intel. “System-level innovations in processing, memory, software and fabric technologies are enabling system capabilities to be designed and optimized for different usages, from traditional HPC to the emerging world of big data analytics and everything in between. We believe the Intel Scalable System Framework is the path forward for designing and delivering the next generation of systems for the ‘HPC everywhere’ era.”

Intel SSF is an advanced architectural approach designed to enable more scalable, flexible and balanced HPC systems. Intel SSF will help to simplify the procurement, deployment and management of HPC systems, broadening the accessibility of HPC to more industries and workloads such as data-driven analytics, visualization and machine learning.

The Intel SSF architecture helps run these divergent workloads that stress different parts of the system – compute, memory, I/O – by enabling innovations that optimize the performance of a variety of workloads to be managed in a consistent way. Intel SSF also provides a consistent platform for HPC system deployments in cloud environments.